The Tree
Tree
oil on canvas
110cm x 110cm
The tree - my motif for home, hearth, and continuum - Family lore.
There was always a tree outside my bedroom window growing up. They sit patiently on the ground reaching for the sky, they are our connectors between heaven and earth staring up at the sun and at night towards the stars, which in turn have look back for millennia.
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We climb them, sit under them, stare out from, look into and through them.
TTLS - photo research collage 210cm x 45cm printouts on paper
When I am Among the Trees by Mary Oliver
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When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
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they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness and discernment,
and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It's simple,” they say,“ and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.
The Tree - photo research collage 210cm x 45cm printouts on paper
The Tree Construction
Animation
Digital
110cm x 110cm
Construct then deconstruct, I would be interested to find a way of incorporating the process in reverse, also to add sound.
Deconstructing both The Tree, and The Gap made me wonder about "the other" realm that existed beneath and behind the surface of the Tree. I began to think of Amy Sillman's layered images. I cut out layers of the tree images and started sticking them over my notes allowing the shapes to guide me. The paper started working like pages in a book or like picking wallpaper and finding layers below.
“No one is allowed to live here unless they first lose their tempers and then get permission from me to take a house.
- The Land of TempersӉۥ Enid Blyton, The Magic Faraway Tree
